The Dell 5130cdn colour laser printer aims high - and on nearly all counts, it succeeds.
It has the speed and features that a high-volume office needs, and the Dell 5130cdn is also on target with its nearly perfect print quality. The price is high, but over the long haul its superlow cost per page will save you money.
The Dell 5130cdn is the fastest printer we've tested to date by a significant margin. On plain paper, it printed text at a rapid clip of 25.2 pages per minute (ppm). Graphics speeds ranged from 8.3 ppm for simpler graphics to 3.2 ppm for high-quality photo printing. On the Mac, using its PostScript driver, the 5130cdn was slightly less speedy: Printing plain text, it averaged 22.5 ppm, while on graphics it averaged 3.1 ppm. On both platforms, the print quality was the same. Text quality was black and crisp. Overall colour quality was very good, with natural colourings and some light graininess, which was more pronounced in grayscale graphics.
The Dell 5130cdn's hulking, dullish-black exterior may look intimidating, but it houses a well-equipped and well-designed machine. The 256MB of DDR-2 standard memory is upgradable to 1.2GB. The standard paper handling includes a 550-sheet main tray and a 150-sheet multipurpose tray. If you need even more capacity, 550-sheet and 1100-sheet additional trays are available, as well as a component for stapling (up to 50 sheets at a time) and stacking up to 1000 sheets. You fold down a front panel to access the toner cartridges and the separate drums, and the entire right-side panel also folds down for clearing jammed paper paths (of which we had none).
The front control panel's cursor and navigation buttons, as well as the monochrome LCD, are intuitive, as is the printer's internal HTML configuration site that allows you to change settings via a Web browser. What all of that adds up to is a sense that this printer is meant to work, not play. Its 110,000-page monthly duty cycle would seem to confirm that.
The Dell 5130cdn ships with standard-size supplies: a 9000-page black cartridge and 6000-page cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridges. Printing costs are pretty low.
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Comments
DELL SUX said: I regret getting this printervery expensive and it fell apart after a year I had it serviced 3 times and then Dell replaced italso the toner is a pain to get the only place to get it is through dell usually costs about 800 dollars to replace the toner after 12000 printsalso no next day shipping on the toners it usually takes about a week or so to get it deliveredoverall its been a horrible experience I will never buy a dell printer probably will never buy a dell cpu either
dls041187 said: Have had the 5130 CDN for 13 months now The consumables are incredibly expensive and only available from Dell We are constantly having to replace toner the toner waste container fuser etc They are all high-priced from DellOne month out of warranty the printer quit with an error that it needed a new belt unit Ordered the belt unit only available from Dell for 37500 and installed it At power up it gave us an 006-370 error and said to call for supportCalled for support and wasted a ridiculous amount of time on hold then being transferred to different peopleFinally spoke to a tech support person who ultimately told me that since the printer wasnt under warranty any longer Id have to order a Ross Assemblyprint head and have the MCUESS board replaced He also told me Id have to hire a technician to install these parts as they are not something a customer can do And he said that I could NOT pay to order the parts from Dell or have a Dell technician do the work because the printer is out of warrantyI spoke to his supervisor who treated me like an idiot and told me repeatedly that if I had just paid the extra money for the extended warranty I wouldnt have to worry about arranging to get the printer fixed on my ownThen I received the following email from DellThe Dell part c399t is not available for sale from Dell as it is recommended to not attempt to replace it Several parts houses do have it available found by internet searching Dell C399T best price for the part only we found is 79500 This has the potential to be a 1000 repair The recommended choice would be to replace the printer If you need anything else please let me knowSo a 13 month old printer that Dell advertises as providing Superb Performance and as an Exceptional Long Term Value will cost more than its purchase price to repair and they recommend just replacing it WHATOur university spends literally hundreds of thousands of dollars with Dell every year and this is the service they provideDell clearly does not stand behind the products they sell and it seems clear that unless you buy the extended warranty your equipement will fail within days of when the one year warranty expiresSo steer clear of Dell products entirely especially this printer